@jeff We tried a non-blocking socket in the main Ruby thread for a bit (ie, not running in a slow second thread), and that actually worked fine. We're now using a C++ socket, which is still an order of magnitude faster. We are working on an efficient way to pass large amounts of geometry data from MatterMachine to SketchUp, at a respectable framerate (10+ fps). The socket seems fine with that.
The bottleneck is rapidly shifting to the translation of that geometry data to SketchUp geometry using Ruby, like you guessed.
On suggestion from Jolran and ThomThom, we are representing geo using fast(er) GL draw calls while the user is editing (using a slider or in-view gizmo). Ideally, we want to build proper SketchUp geo as soon as the user stops editing (mouseup). We'll see if that's realistic. We'd like to get a better user experience than the Grasshopper - Rhino interaction.
At this time, it looks like we should be able to compile for both Mac & PC, and even older versions of SketchUp using Ruby 1.8.
